Relational art is told at MAXXI – Rome – Arte.it

Roma – An announcer asks the visitor’s name and then passes it on to those present. It is the performance of Pierre Huyghe, Name Announcerpart of the route 1+1. Relational artthe world’s first major retrospective dedicated to one of the most influential movements of the new millennium, thirty years after its confirmation, scheduled at the MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts until March 1, 2026.
The term ‘Relational Art’ was coined in 1995 by the French critic Nicolas Bourriaud, the same who, together with Eleonora Farina, curated the Roman exhibition and charted its evolution. In his essay “Esthétique relationnelle” (1998), Bourriaud defines it as “a set of artistic practices that take human relationships and their social context as their starting point, rather than an autonomous or private space.” And so at MAXXI, instead of simply displaying the works, the route activates them in space, creating a three-way relationship between the audience, the architecture and the artistic creation.
MAXXI, Vanessa Beecroft, VB74, 2014-2018 | Photo: © Luis do Rosario

Se Love medicine (PEA) by Carsten Höller invites the audience to smell the contents of a glass bottle containing phenethylamine, a substance naturally produced by the brain in states of love. Philippe Parreno’s imposing Christmas tree leads to the “1+1” video room, an adjacent space where the video works of Pierre Huyghe, Grace Ndiritu, Mark Leckey and Pia Rönicke are presented. The large installations of “1+1” will be located on the second terrace. untitled 1990 (pad thai) by Rirkrit Tiravanija, a relational work par excellence that exposes the remains of an artistic action that the artist carries out by cooking in the exhibition gallery and then Leave the seat by Angela Bulloch, a set of airline instructions regarding seats near emergency exits, created for the first test for the 1997 Turner Prize. Along the ramp are large two-dimensional works by Maurizio Cattelan, including the famous Without title with gallery owner Massimo De Carlo on the wall, by Vanessa Beecroft, VB74 in the MAXXI Collection, and by Santiago Sierra.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres instead welcomes guests with a pile of chocolates and a stack of red sheets leading to a series of works on the wall, almost a contemporary photo gallery with works by Christian Jankowski, Monica Bonvicini, Gillian Wearing and Cesare Pietroiusti. More than 4,000 names written on the wall mark Douglas Gordon’s intervention instead List of names (random) responds to the memory of all the people he met between 1990 and 2017.
In the glass arm, the project opens a dialogue with some precursors of relational aesthetics.
Born at the dawn of the Internet age and evolving over the years into a global language, relational art implies a set of practices that focus on human relationships, rather than on the artistic object or the artist’s private space. Proximity, conviviality, micro-utopias and participatory processes are the principles that unite the research of the 45 artists on display, from Vanessa Beecroft to Maurizio Cattelan, from Carsten Höller to Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Gabriel Orozco, Santiago Sierra, Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

MAXXI, Relational art, Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled 1999, photo Armin Linke

“The clear intuition of Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘travelling companion’ of many of the artists present in 1+1, was to discover a common thread between this artistic research and these experiments in the mid-nineties, to testify to their innovative power and to understand that the relationship with the Other, in a world about to undergo radical and extraordinary epoch-making changes, would be the basis of the art and society of the millennium that was about to begin” said Maria Emanuela Bruni, President of the MAXXI Foundation.
In Piazza Alighiero Boetti, a loudspeaker broadcasts jokes in Romanian, an audio work by Jens Haaning Romanian jokes, and winks at the facade of Via Guido Reni, where you can occasionally find a passer-by that Braco Dimitrievijc photographed a few days before the inauguration of the series The random passerby I met.